Alissa Valles’s Herbert is slack, chattersome, hysterical, full of exaggeration, complacency, and reaching for effect. The original (I’m quite sure) is none of those things. This Collected Poems is a hopelessly, irredeemably bad book. The only solution to its problems would be a bulk reinstatement of the old translations. These things matter so much; it would be nice if they made a difference.
ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
For twenty years, since I first read the first poem, “To Go to Lvov”—in his first English-language book, Tremor—I have had a happily unexamined admiration for the work of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Hence, perhaps, the inordinate difficulty—even for me, with my sluggishness and resistances—in approaching it now in a spirit of let’s call it serious holism. And yet, I very much wanted to do it. Something about Zagajewski’s poetry—the joyful flavors of it—seemed to me to elicit (or elicit from me) something like its dialectical opposite: something austere, grinding, agnostic, judicious.
I suppose what I always liked about Zagajewski’s poetry is the sense of the poet as companion, as fellow reader and traveler, sharing his notes on books and places, in four books of essays and four collections of poems, without very much to tell them apart. (Though I’ve only met him half a dozen times at most, his voice is one of those I can hear absolutely at will.) The poems ramble woolgatheringly, and the essays are yet more aimlessly beautiful affairs than the now slightly old-fashioned-sounding label suggests; rarely do they have anything either forensic or brutally argumentative about them. There is something enviably light-footed, alert, intense, and momentary about all the writing. It is adventitious, unplanned, follows its nose, goes very often sideways. It has a feline quality and puts me in mind of Zagajewski’s curled purr (I don’t know for a fact, but I don’t have the slightest doubt he’s a cat lover). Like a companion, you see it from the side as you amblingly read, its marked profile. (In addition to those essays, Zagajewski has written at least one novel, which I read in German, about a Polish painter in Berlin. The book was called Der dünne Strich [“The Thin Line” or “The Fine Line”], which is its protagonist’s nickname: it might stand for Zagajewski himself). He teaches a term a year—a confrère!—in the States, and after living in Paris for twenty-five years has recently gone to live in Cracow, where he studied philosophy.
Somewhere, the poems are one poem, and the prose one prose—or they are even, all together, one writing. The names of poets—and, still more, of philosophers and composers—occur as naturally and profusely in the poems as the names of trees, or relatives, or types of fruit in the prose. Someone’s sonatas or pensées are set next to a church or a square in a town, or a painting, or the scent of some flower or bush. The world—including great parts of the human-made world—is there for our study and our delectation. And amid these stimuli, sipping, musing, modestly disclaiming all forms of industry, proficiency, or diligence, sometimes mildly remonstrating with himself (“I haven’t written a single poem / in months. / I’ve lived humbly, reading the paper, / pondering the riddle of power / and the reasons for obedience”), and sometimes voicing something more like a prayer (“Give us astonishment / and a flame, high, bright”) is an engaging private “I” (“Herr Doktor, Herr Privatdozent”), bookworm, globetrotter, noticer, who seems very close to the poet himself.
The experience of reading them is very different, but the unselfconscious way Zagajewski handles this “I” brings to mind Frank O’Hara. Certainly, it wouldn’t be easy to say which is the more charming, and charm is very much the issue. The difference is that in O’Hara, the “I” (as in “I do this, I do that”) is the repository of all charm—the poems are, you might say, in Norman someone’s phrase, “advertisements for myself”—in Zagajewski, the charm is that of all the world, and it is a little mysterious why no one else has noticed it first. One is solar, one is lunar. O’Hara, straightening his eyelids, throwing a couple of tangerines in an overnight bag, is personally and actively and often spectacularly eccentric; Zagajewski—if such a thing can be imagined—passively and haphazardly and rather demurely so. “Do you mean to say this has never occurred to you?” his poems seem to say, “Where have you been? What do you spend your time doing?” “I wasn’t in this poem, /” he writes, “only gleaming pure pools, / a lizard’s tiny eye, the wind / and the sounds of a harmonica / pressed to not my lips.” And that’s the poem.
Like O’Hara’s, Zagajewski’s poems often follow no marked or discernible plan. The poems are not particularly situated or directed. Their identity is more often collective than individual. Some—like “I Wasn’t in This Poem”—are short, others are two or three pages, but generally speaking, it would be easy to move lines or blocks from one to another: “September approaches; war, death,” “The sun, the opulent sun of September,” “September kissed the hills / and treetops like someone leaving,” “Peace, thick nothing, as full of sweet / juice as a pear in September.” This requires, I think, the reader’s assent to a sort of poetic carousel, where things come round repeatingly or blurred. It is a question both of mood—something about the cusp of feeling and thought particularly and almost dependably excites Zagajewski, even though he’s not a poet of great feeling or profound thinking, and you could hardly get him more wrong than by claiming, say, that the essays “think,” and the poems “feel”—and of a set of properties. Whether deliberately or not, a Zagajewski poem is like a holiday. It has a sense of leisure, of an optional or even a privileged agenda (a café, a museum, a friend or spouse, the meaning of life), it is not in a suit and tie, and it carries no briefcase. There is the holiday air of feeling more purely, as it were, more vividly, alive, but also the statistical improbability (two weeks in fifty-two?) of being there at all. Intensity or relishing of experience comes paired with a certain air of hovering. It is lifted out, suspended, musing (“A Morning in Vicenza”):
The sun was so fragile, so young,
that we were a little scared; a careless move
might scratch it, just a shout—if anyone
had tried—might do it harm; only the rushing swifts,
with wings hard as cast-iron,
were free to sing out loud, because they’d spent their brief,
uneasy childhoods in clay nests
alongside siblings, small, mad planets,
black as forest berries.
This looping through sensation, through layerings of metaphor and whimsy, this tracing of delicate aerial patternings, this speeding instability is what you get in Zagajewski. Contraries—hard and soft, timidity and boldness, silence and noise, light and darkness—are effortlessly fused together. It is a poetry not of manipulation but of adhesion: it is like a rodeo, but with swifts in lieu of mustangs or bulls.
A great many of Zagajewski’s poems are—as here—dramas of presence and absence. “A Morning in Vicenza” goes on to become an elegy to two admired friends, Joseph Brodsky and Krzysztof Kieślowski, but it could have gone anywhere (I quoted the first of its three stanzas). This unpredictability, storylessness, geographical unattachment is a feature of Zagajewski; the Selected Poems (cut down from a somewhat longer American selection called Without End) might be subtitled “one hundred and sixty-three looks at the world.” In Two Cities of 1995, the best of his prose books, Zagajewski writes: “If people are divided into the settled, the emigrants, and the homeless, then I certainly belong to the third category, although I understand it very soberly, without a shadow of sentimentality or self-pity. […] To be homeless […] means only that the person having this defect cannot indicate the streets, cities, or community that might be his home, his, as one is wont to say, miniature homeland.” Zagajewski was a few months old when the Polish population of Lvov (reassigned to the Ukraine and called Lviv) was moved to Gliwice (the German Gleiwitz, whose inhabitants were similarly relocated), where he grew up in a haunting atmosphere of denial, make-believe, and shallow-rooted provisionality, utterly at variance with the grand, perduring, instaurational claims of communism. Some inhabitants o
ut of protest never left their flats, others talked obsessively to the young Zagajewski of the beauty and the layout of their former city, others again specialized in collecting derelict “post-German” goods of rather superior workmanship. It is this drama, personal and collective, that fuels “To Go to Lvov,” his longest poem (it is almost three pages) and for me still unsurpassed (but that’s no disgrace: it’s one of the outstanding poems of the past forty years):
To go to Lvov. Which station
for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew
gleams on a suitcase, when express
trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave
in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September
or in March. But only if Lvov exists,
if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just
in my new passport, if lances of trees
—of poplar and ash—still breathe aloud
like Indians, and if streams mumble
their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs
in the Russian language disappear
into thickets. To pack and set off, to leave
without a trace, at noon, to vanish
like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green
armies of burdocks, and below, under the canvas
of a Venetian café, the snails converse
about eternity.
(That’s the beginning: it hurts to stop quoting.) What I might call the “variorum infinitive” continues throughout the poem, to its very last half line, the finite-infinite: “It is everywhere.” Plangency is transmuted into abundance, inaccessibility into a ubiquity of ghostly detail, inert substance into atomized fragrance.
Nothing thereafter has quite the clarity, the attack, the conviction, the purpose, the monumentality of “To Go to Lvov”—but then there are many poems to be written, and many ways of writing them. It reads almost like the first poem of someone beginning to write—which God knows it wasn’t—such is its headlong, heedless speed, its bold impossibilist loveliness. But again, this happens: there is only one “Prufrock,” one “Provincia Deserta,” one “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” Later poems exhibit a certain frugality, prudence, anxiety, patience, pacing, routine. They somewhat deliberately settle beside one another. Poetry becomes a habit—even “I haven’t written a single poem / in months” becomes a habit—and one makes the best of it, as reader, or writer. The issue of Zagajewski’s “homelessness,” while hardly ever again as explicitly—Edenically—addressed as in “To Go to Lvov,” nevertheless informs all his writing. It is there in the fullness and equability of his responses, the ungrammatical or unhierarchical speed—not grammaticized or hierarchized by belonging in any particular place—of his perceptions, “seeking the spot / where silence suddenly erupts in speech,” whether in verse or prose (“A Small Nation Writes a Letter to God” in Two Cities):
Light, translucent mists gathered over the fields, harvesters ate their dinners under a broad linden tree growing in the fencerow. It was so hot that hawks fell asleep in flight. And only a brown train patiently cut a shallow furrow through the heat. Rivers steamed. Creeks stopped in their tracks. Sap melted like a lump of snow. There was no mercy anywhere. Sometimes someone brought a little water to the station. What was this ill-formed, lazy train when compared to the beauty of a rustling wood? Thirsty snakes drank from puddles. Hurriedly buttoning their uniforms, sleepy stationmasters ran onto the platforms of small stations.
Or (a particularly lovely short poem) “Ode to Softness”:
Mornings are blind as newborn cats.
Fingernails grow so trustfully, for a while
they don’t know what they’re going to touch. Dreams
are soft, and tenderness looms over us
like fog, like the cathedral bell of Krakow
before it cooled.
This benign, animating, gently humorous imagination suffuses Zagajewski’s writing. Just as details are adduced that speak to the conditions of drought (in the prose), and of a tentative delicacy (in the poem), so every part of speech seems to work in these fabulous and harmonious rearrangements of the world: “furrow,” “steamed,” “sleepy,” “hurriedly”; “blind,” “trustfully,” “tenderness,” “cooled.” It is no surprise that Zagajewski has written (again in Two Cities) a short “Defense of Adjectives,” and probably they are his most defining words—though I must say, I have a particular weakness for his adverbs, a still more neglected part of speech in poetry; sometimes he seems to me the only poet who uses adverbs, certainly his are among the few I remember. Something about the mobility and expressiveness of this style corresponds in my eyes to Zagajewski’s condition of “homelessness”; things require and acquire extra definition from the homeless poet. The fact that so much subtlety and dexterity are purveyed at such speed is probably the final, briefest, clinching argument for Zagajewski’s greatness (“The Churches of France”):
The churches of France, more welcoming than its inns and its poems,
Standing in vines like great clusters of grapes, or meekly, on hilltops,
Or drowned in valleys, on the floor of a green sea, in a dry landscape,
Abandoned buildings, deserted barns
Of gray stone, among gray houses, within gray villages,
But inside pink or white or painted by the sun coming through stained glass.
Little Romanesque shrines with stocky frames, like craftsmen shaped by their labor,
Pascal’s invisible church, sewn into canvas,
And slim cathedrals like herons above the cities, seen clearly from the highway, the loveliest is in Chartres,
Where stone stifles desire.
The two dangers to this type of writing are routine and sweetness. It can become either too easy, or too rich. Zagajewski has not managed to avoid either completely. The diction of some of the new poems has a hallowed, stained-glass simplicity that I don’t always like, and the poems themselves are like minor revisitings of earlier tropes. It is as though Zagajewski has found a way of—no pun intended, but it just about works—“bottling it.” The writing is still fresh, but a little weary in its familiar celebratoriness: “Joy is close,” “the ocean’s skin, on which / ships etch the lines of shining poems,” “should such a splendid upright shape, a king, / be made a horizontal form, a line of print?” In 163 poems, there are 30 references to “poetry” or “poems,” which, for a nonnaturally occurring form, seems to me too many. The prose, at the same time, has fallen for the dubious attractions of the word “splendid,” which always struck me as a peculiarly bland and plummy and condescending bow tie of a word (and, incidentally, impossible to square with “ardor”): one of Keats’s “splendid letters,” Herbert as a “splendid” reader of his own poems, the “splendid” Parisian light, that “splendid” disease known as inspiration. I don’t think it’s a translation issue either. (But a note in any case on the translations; the various English versions of Zagajewski have a consummate identity and primacy and authority, to which to respond as to an original quite simply doesn’t seem wrong. Clare Cavanagh, the translator of half the poetry and two of the prose books, is obviously a huge factor in the reception of Polish writing in English [she is also the translator of Wysława Szymborska], while Renata Gorczynski, who, with help from Robert Hass, translated Tremor, I like even more for her willingness to eccentricity in diction and lineation.)
Where Have You Been? Page 18
